Pre-press color-proofing is a procedure that is used by the printing industry for creating representative images of printed material without the high cost and time that is required to actually produce printing plates and set up a high-speed, high volume, printing press to produce an example of the intended image. The process of producing an example of an intended image may require several corrections and be reproduced several times to satisfy the customer which, if printing plates were produced corresponding to each correction, would result in significantly higher costs to the customer.
A commercially available image processing apparatus is described in commonly assigned U.S. Pat. No. 5,268,708. This image processing apparatus forms an intended image on a sheet of thermal print media by transferring dye from several sheets of dye donor material, one sheet at a time, to the thermal print media. Thermal energy is applied to the dye donor sheets by a laser to form the intended image.
Once the intended image meets the customers requirements, imagesetter recording films required for exposing printing plates are produced. These imagesetter recording films are generated on a separate apparatus such as an imagesetter. The imagesetter recording films are used to expose printing plates on yet another machine. Printing plates may also be produced on a separate apparatus without using imagesetter film for exposing.
Although the presently known and utilized image processing apparatus is satisfactory, a need exists to produce printing plates on the same apparatus that generates the intended images, sometime called a contract proof, eliminating the need for multiple machines.